1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a speech recognition system, and more particularly, to performing Natural Language Understanding functions by directly identifying the semantic information and other information derived from a spoken utterance.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, conventional speech recognition systems that perform Natural Language Understanding (NLU) functions operate in two main sequential stages. In a first stage, a speech recognition unit translates speech into text which contains a transcription of a user utterance. In a second stage, a specific NLU unit reads this text having a sequence of words which have been recognized in the first stage. The NLU system then can generate the information required to process the speech.
Prior art NLU techniques have been based on this two-stage process which operates at the word level. The process compares the words of the uttered speech to words previously stored in a word vocabulary. Accordingly, conventional NLU systems require specific NLU units and associated computer resources to process a text input.